The present invention relates to a level shift circuit functioning as an interface between circuits operating at different power supply voltages.
In a conventional level shift circuit having a CMOS configuration, a p-MOS transistor and an n-MOS transistor connected in series and interposed between the power supply and the ground inevitably turn ON at the same time at the transition of a data input and, as a result, feed-through current occurs at this time (see Japanese Laid-Open Publication No. 11-136120).
An LCD driver needs level shift circuits in the number obtained by multiplying the number of outputs by the number of bits. For example, an LCD driver having 8 bits and 384 outputs uses as many as 3072 level shift circuits. An application in which such a large number of level shift circuits are used has a drawback of increased power consumption caused by feed-through current in each of the level shift circuits and also has a drawback of a system malfunction occurring when an increase in the ground potential caused by the feed-through current is output as a noise to the outside of the chip.